Despite the decrease in subscriber numbers, World of Warcraft remains the number one subscription-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game, by WOTLK Classic Gold Activision.By comparison, Electronic Arts' Star Wars: The Old Republic had fewer than 500.000 players as of March 31.The news comes as part of the company's first quarter-end earnings report, which has seen the publisher record 456 million in profits on $1.32 billion revenues for the three-month period that ended on March 31.

Kotick stated that even though the year has gotten off to a solid start it is still a good reason to be skeptical about Activision Blizzard's prospects for the second half of the year.

"While we've had a solid start to the year, we believe that risks and uncertainty in the second half of 2013 are more threatening than our earlier view and especially in the quarter leading up to Christmas," Kotick said in prepared remarks. "The shift in release dates for rival products and the disappointing announcement of Wii U, uncertainties regarding next-generation hardware, and declining subscriber numbers in the World of Warcraft business all make us nervous, as do ongoing challenges facing world economic conditions."

These problems are cause for concern, Kotick said. However, he also acknowledged the fact that Activision Blizzard will be able to deliver shareholder value by employing the same tactics which have made the business one of the industry's biggest publishers for the last 20 years.

"For those reasons we are cautious," he said. "However our focused and methodical approach to our business has proved to be successful in the past and with the continued investment as well as cautious management of our costs we are confident of creating shareholder value over the long haul, as we have done for the past two decades."Activision is holding a financial call post-earnings.

In order to handle the large number of people who may want to play this WoW Classic test, Blizzard has implemented a 60-minute time limit for play. Additionally, there's a 90-minute cooldown period as well. Thus, for instance that you play the game for 30 minutes and then leave for 60 minutes you could continue to play for another 60 minutes then wait for another chance to play.

World of Warcraft is in the middle of its newest expansion, dubbed Battle For Azeroth. In the Battle For Azeroth review-in-progress, Ginny Woo rated the expansion an 8/10 rating, noting, "It's clear that Battle for Azeroth does its best to accommodate the needs of new players alongside the needs of cheap WOTLK Classic Gold long-time players, like in Legion It demonstrates how the boundary between oversimplification and refinement could be extremely thin. Overall, it's a great upgrade in World of Warcraft 's current state, however it's a chance to determine if its future content will provide something unique."